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It turns out bike-friendliness is second nature for Harvard University. Weeks after being named a Silver-Level Bike Friendly University by the League of American Bicyclists, Harvard University was recognized as a Gold-level Bike Friendly Business by Mayor Menino and the city of Boston. Representatives from Harvard’s Longwood campus were joined by Harvard’s Commuter Choice Program in receiving Gold-level awards from Transportation Commissioner Thomas Tinlin and Director of Boston Bikes Nicole Freedman.

In total, 41 Boston businesses were recognized in the gold, silver, and bronze categories. Gold-level businesses must achieve 22 points on a criteria checklist that ranges from number of outdoor and secured indoor bike racks, bike commuter financial incentives, Walk/Ride days, access to bike tools, and shower facilities. The combined efforts of the Longwood Cyclists’ Group, Harvard’s Commuter Choice Program, and the various School-based bike-initiatives continue to contribute to the level of bike-friendliness and improved measures to create a healthy and safe cycling community on Harvard’s campuses.

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Harvard University Provost Alan M. Garber announced that Sarah Thomas of the University of Oxford has been named vice president for the Harvard Library.

In this role, Thomas will have overall responsibility for the Harvard Library, and will collaborate closely with the Library Board, the Faculty Advisory Council and the Library Leadership Team.

Garber noted, “Sarah Thomas is a leader in her field with an exceptional record of success running major academic libraries. She is uniquely capable of building on the progress we have made thus far in responding to the evolving expectations of the 21st century scholar. Working closely with Library staff, faculty, students and School and University leadership, Sarah will help Harvard continue to set the standard for academic libraries worldwide.”

Thomas currently serves as Bodley’s Librarian and director of the Bodleian Libraries—the first woman and non-British citizen to hold the position in 400 years—as well as pro-vice-chancellor and member of the faculty of modern languages at the University of Oxford . Previous to Oxford, Thomas was the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell. She served as the president of the Association of Research Libraries, and also held posts at the Library of Congress, where she led in the establishment of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, the National Agricultural Library, the Research Libraries Group at Stanford University and Harvard’s Widener Library, among other positions.

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The Harvard Library and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University are pleased to announce the appointment of Peter Suber as director of the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC), starting July 1, 2013. Suber will continue his current activities as director of the Harvard Open Access Project, based at the Berkman Center, as well as his affiliations as a Berkman faculty fellow, senior researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and research professor of philosophy at Earlham College.

Suber’s new role with the OSC closely aligns with his work leading the Harvard Open Access Project. Both are driven by a common vision for opening access to cutting-edge research for everyone who can make use of it. Integrating the two roles into one position will allow the projects to better share strategies, staff, resources, and knowledge, and accelerate the progress of open access both within and beyond Harvard.
Suber is taking over executive leadership of the OSC from Stuart Shieber, Welch Professor of Computer Science in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and founding faculty director of the OSC. Shieber will continue as faculty director, though with a reduced role, co-chairing the Faculty Advisory Committee to the OSC with Suber, serving in an advisory capacity to the office, and working on individual projects with the OSC. Sue Kriegsman, OSC program manager, will continue to oversee the office’s operations and staff, as the activities of the office continue to expand and mature.

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The conversation around health care policy in the United States, mired as it is in partisan bickering, has gone off course from what should be its larger goal — building the foundation of a secure and prosperous society, according to Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) student Suzanne Brundage, SM ’14. Having recently left a position as assistant director of the Global Health Policy Center, part of Washington, D.C. think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Brundage hopes to bring the lessons she’s learned from her global health work — such as building coalitions and connecting the dots for policy makers between health and economic prosperity and security — to bear on domestic health challenges.

Joining CSIS soon after graduating from Bennington College, Brundage quickly moved into high-level policy work, including briefing members of Congress on global health issues and leading a commission whose work was cited in a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a convincing argument for U.S. engagement in the world.

Although she loved her job, Brundage began to feel pulled toward helping the U.S. health care system become the best it could be. “The global health community has so much energy and creativity behind it,” said Brundage, who is earning her degree in health policy and management.

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More than 5% of U.S. teens and adolescents use snuff, chewing tobacco, or dipping tobacco—and that rate has been about the same for a decade, according to new research from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. In 2011, 5.2% of middle and high school kids used smokeless tobacco; in 2000, the rate of use was 5.3%. The findings, from the school-based National Youth Tobacco Survey, were reported in the May 15, 2013 Journal of the American Medical Association.

In a video interview with MedPage Today, study co-author Gregory Connolly, director of HSPH’s Center for Global Tobacco Control and professor of the practice of public health in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, said the fact that there’s been no recent decline in smokeless tobacco use—while cigarette use has steadily declined—is cause for concern. He noted that the government’s tough measures aimed at reducing cigarette smoking—raising taxes, requiring stronger warning labels, and banning flavors—did not carry over to smokeless tobacco.

“We have to treat all tobacco products alike,” Connolly said. “Otherwise we see this switching of youngsters away from cigarette smoking to combined use of smokeless tobacco and cigarettes, and that is not going to reduce the disease risk in our nation from tobacco.”

See MedPage Today article and video

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Bicycle engineering guidelines often used by state regulators to design bicycle facilities need to be overhauled to reflect current cyclists’ preferences and safety data, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers. They say that U.S. guidelines should be expanded to offer cyclists more riding options and call for endorsing cycle tracks – physically separated, bicycle-exclusive paths adjacent to sidewalks – to encourage more people of all ages to ride bicycles.

The study appears online May 16, 2013 and will appear in the July 2013 print edition of the American Journal of Public Health.

Standards set by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) in its Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities generally serve vehicles well but overlook most bicyclists’ needs, according to lead author Anne Lusk, research scientist in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH, who has been studying bicycling patterns in the U.S. and abroad for many years. “In the U.S., the default remains the painted bike lane on the road,” she said, which is problematic since research has shown that women, seniors, and children prefer not to ride on roads with traffic.

According to the researchers, the AASHTO guidelines discouraged or did not include cycle tracks due to alleged safety concerns and did not cite research about crash rates on cycle tracks. This study analyzed five state-adopted U.S. bicycle guidelines published between 1972 and 1999 to understand how the guidelines have directed the building of bicycle facilities in the U.S.

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EdX, the not-for-profit online learning initiative composed of the leading global institutions of the xConsortium, today announced another doubling of its university membership with the addition of its first Asian institutions and further expansion in the Ivy League.

The xConsortium is gaining 15 prestigious higher education institutions, bringing its total to 27, including Tsinghua University and Peking University in China, The University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in Hong Kong, Kyoto University in Japan, and Seoul National University in South Korea, and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The expansion reflects edX’s rapidly growing global student body and supports its vision of transforming education by bringing the power of learning to all regardless of location or social status.

EdX also welcomes nine universities from North America, Europe and Australia. In the United States, in addition to Cornell, the consortium has added Cornell University, Berklee College of Music, Boston University, Davidson College, and University of Washington.

From Europe, edX welcomes Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, Belgium’s Université catholique de Louvain, and Germany’s Technical University of Munich. The University of Queensland in Australia becomes the second Australian university to join the xConsortium.

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The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study awarded the Captain Jonathan Fay Prize to the graduating seniors whose theses set forth the most imaginative work and original research.

This year three Fay Prize recipients were chosen from 81 Thomas Hoopes Prize winners for outstanding scholarly work or research: mathematics concentrator Ashok Cutkosky for his thesis Polymer Simulations and DNA Topology; history and literature concentrator Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey for his thesis The “Electrified Fable”: Radio Experimentation, Interwar Social Psychology, and Imagined Invasion in the War of the Worlds; and history concentrator Laura Savarese for her thesis Slavery’s Battleground: Contesting the Status of Enslaved and Free Blacks in St. Louis, from Statehood to the Civil War.

“The work of the 2013 Fay Prize winners demonstrates the original thinking that Harvard encourages and that the Radcliffe Institute is dedicated to supporting,” said Radcliffe Institute Dean Cohen, when presenting the awards to the three Fay Prize winners. “We are honoring the distinguished work of these young minds and predict this is just the first of many remarkable achievements.”

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Members of the community recently flocked to the Weissman Preservation Center and the Collections Conservation Lab for their Open House tours, held in celebration of the American Library Association’s Preservation Week 2013. The informal tours gave visitors a glimpse into the dedication, precision, and level of care provided to Harvard’s millions of books, photographs, artifacts and other items.

Conservators and technicians at the Weissman Preservation Center work with rare books, works on paper and photographs, stabilizing and mending damaged items—and sometimes analyzing the elemental status of a piece to determine the best and safest course of treatment for a damaged item.

At the Collections Conservation Lab, located in Widener Library, Library Assistant Humberto Oliveira showed visitors the process for mending books and returning them to the stacks for their continued use.

The lab mends materials from libraries all across Harvard, and professionals such as Oliveira strive to leave as little trace as possible in their work. If a book needs a new spine, for example, a strip of thick, resilient cloth will be dyed to match the original binding. When a spine is intact but the binding is damaged, technicians will save the spine and create new book covers by hand that match closely to the original work. A book may require just a few minutes of attention, or several hours.

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In the digital age, some professors might grumble that students today don’t even know how to read a newspaper. Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of the History and Literature Program, knows that they’re right.

Lepore recently shared her story during “Reality Matters,” organized by Harvard Library Strategic Conservations, which explored the use of items from the wealth of Harvard’s library and museum collections, and the benefits and challenges of both tactile and digital versions for teaching and learning.

“I’ve really struggled with the implications of a generational gap between me and my students, wherein their principal encounter with many different kinds of information has only ever been digital,” Lepore said.

Lepore joined with Leah Price, professor of English, to develop a course called “How to Read a Book,” in which students read books that focus on reading, such as Fahrenheit 451. In the class, students were asked to take notes using a variety of note-taking devices: making their own clay tablets, using ink and quills, and even typewriters.

“Students really learned from that, and we learned a lot from it,” she said, noting that the students found taking notes on clay tablets was surprisingly challenging.

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When it comes to using new technology in education, “the trick is not to adopt, but to adapt,” Harvard School of Public Health Dean Julio Frenk told the audience at the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference, held at Harvard’s Science Center on May 8, 2013. The conference focused on the essentials of good teaching and learning. Participants examined teaching and learning issues from three perspectives: “The Science of Learning,” “The Art of Teaching,” and “Innovation, Adaptation, Preservation.”

Dean Frenk, focusing on adaptation, spoke about HSPH’s efforts in both residential and online learning.

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Anniversaries offer an opportunity to reflect on the past and contemplate the future. One year ago, we announced the launch of both edX, the not-for-profit open-source online learning platform created by Harvard and MIT, and HarvardX, the partner organization which supports online pedagogy and its application to on-campus education as well as educational research.

Harvard’s activities in interactive teaching and learning are part of a long tradition of pedagogical innovation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School pioneered the application of the case method of teaching in professional schools. In 1885, the College instituted the elective curriculum, defining the undergraduate experience across the country, with President Charles William Eliot referring to the change as “the most generally useful piece of work which this university has ever executed.”

Two centuries later, this spirit of educational innovation inspired one of the first undergraduate computer science degrees and a groundbreaking medical education curriculum that integrated clinical teaching and problem solving with basic science. Most recently, the FIELD program has revolutionized MBA education by immersing future business leaders in emerging global markets.

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Anant Agarwal, president of edX, the nonprofit online enterprise founded by Harvard and MIT, has been named to the Boston Globe’s 100 Innovators of 2013, “a list of trailblazers working in fields from medicine to robotics to social services.”

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Cycling around campus has never been easier or cheaper.  CommuterChoice and Hubway, Metro-Boston’s regional bike share, are happy to announce a new, discounted annual membership rate of just $50 for students, faculty and staff.  That’s 40% less than the previous cost of membership. Harvard now supports 12 stations, plus there are dozens of locations throughout the region, meaning there are plenty of convenient pick-up and drop-off points.

To sign up for an annual membership, simply visit thehubway.com, select Harvard University and then follow the instructions. “The number of people in the Harvard community who are bicycling to work or for fun is growing fast,” said Associate Director of CommuterChoice Kris Locke.  “We want to keep the momentum going because bike sharing is clearly fulfilling a large need.” In fact, the number of bike share stations across the region has nearly doubled since last summer.

Click here to watch a brief video about how easy it is to use Hubway. Also, follow them on Twitter and Facebook to learn about the latest Hubway news and information.

Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, is pleased to announce that Gia Wolff, an architect based in Brooklyn, New York, is the winner of the inaugural Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 traveling fellowship dedicated to fostering new forms of architectural research informed by cross-cultural engagement.

The Wheelwright Prize jury—Mostafavi, Yung Ho Chang, Farès el-Dahdah, K. Michael Hays, Farshid Moussavi, Zoe Ryan, and Jorge Silvetti—selected Gia Wolff from among 231 applicants from 45 countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, Burkina Faso, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, and Spain. Applicants were asked to submit portfolios along with a research proposal and travel itinerary, outlining an extended field investigation and its anticipated benefits for the field of architecture.

Wolff is the first winner of the new Wheelwright Prize, an update of the Arthur Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, which was established in 1935 and previously available only to GSD alumni. The original prize was conceived at a time when few architects traveled abroad, and for many early recipients—including Paul Rudolph, Eliot Noyes, William Wurster, and I. M. Pei—the fellowship financed travels that followed the tradition of the Grand European Tour.

Wolff’s winning proposal, Floating City: The Community-Based Architecture of Parade Floats, proposes the study of the tradition of parade floats—elaborate temporary and mobile constructions that are realized annually in carnival festivals in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Goa (India), Nice (France), Santa Cruze de Tenerife (Spain), and Viarreggio (Italy).

The $100,000 grant will fund Wolff’s research over the next two years.

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Patient safety expert Lucian Leape has called for the creation of a federal agency to compel safer hospital practices. He thinks regulation is the only way to effectively reduce the avoidable harm that takes place in the nation’s hospitals.

“I’ll put my chips on brute force, and that is regulation,” said Leape, adjunct professor of health policy in the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) Department of Health Policy and Management, at the recent Association of Health Care Journalists conference in Boston. Following up on his remarks in a May 13, 2013 article for HealthLeaders Magazine, he said, “We need to quit blaming and punishing people when they make mistakes and recognize that errors are symptoms of a system that’s not working right, and go figure that out and change the system so no one will make that error again, hopefully. We have to change the culture so everyone feels safety is his or her responsibility and identifies hazards before someone gets hurt.”

For instance, Leape said, hospitals workers should always disinfect their hands and get immunized against influenza. “But we have no mechanism for making that happen,” he said. “If a hospital doesn’t require it, nothing happens, and that’s not right. It should be illegal….It’s incomprehensible to me that hospitals can continue to not follow practices that are known to make a real difference.”

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It’s Wednesday night in Cambridge and Thursday morning in Beijing, and their seminar rooms are some 6,700 miles apart, but for 30 students from Harvard Law School and the Renmin University of China School of Law, common interests and videoconferencing equipment easily bridge these distances.

During this spring semester, students in a reading group taught by HLS Professor William P. Alford and an advanced negotiation skills class taught by Renmin Assistant Professor Alonzo Emery ’10 have come together electronically to consider the roles of China and the U.S. in a world order in flux. “The U.S.-China relationship is often touted as the most important relationship to manage ‘properly’ if we are to have the type of peaceful world envisioned by all of us in the course,” explains Emery. They were also joined for several class sessions by Han Dayuan, dean of Renmin Law School, and Ding Xiangshun, a Renmin professor currently at HLS as a Fulbright Scholar.

Alford, HLS’s vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies, worked for more than a year to plan this foray into the electronic classroom—an idea that is beginning to take root at HLS through faculty initiatives, the Law School’s first EdX course (Copyright, taught this spring by HLS Professor and Berkman Center for Internet & Society Faculty Director William Fisher III), student interest, and strong advocacy by alumni, including Gus Hauser ’53.

Read the full story on the Harvard Law School website.

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In March, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick ’82 nominated Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute clinical instructor Gloria Tan to a seat on the Massachusetts Juvenile Court. Tan came to CJI, which supervises third-year law students representing indigent criminal defendants in local district and juvenile courts, after serving as a public defender for the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Boston. When a spot opened up on CPCS’s Youth Advocacy Project, Tan switched to working on juvenile cases and has spent her career doing so ever since. Tan was sworn in on May 3.

How has your experience at Harvard prepared you for your judicial appointment?

At Harvard, I had the opportunity to supervise law students who represented indigent adult and juvenile clients charged with crimes, in addition to representing my own clients. Working in the clinic and with the students allowed me to reflect and work on many of the issues in the criminal justice system.

What is it like to work with students in the clinic?

The law students in CJI are some of the most talented, motivated, smart and thoughtful people. I learned as much from them as I hope they learned from me. They continually inspired me with their dedication and commitment to their clients and their questioning of the injustices that exist in the system. When you’ve been practicing for a while, it is sometimes easy to become accepting of how things are.

Read the rest of the interview on the Harvard Law School website.

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The biennial Harvard Law School Conference on Intellectual Property Law attracted scores of IP lawyers, business people, academicians, and judges to the school April 12 to discuss recent developments in IP law.

According to William W. Fisher, the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at HLS and co-chair of the event since its inception 10 years ago, the purpose of the conference is to stimulate discussion of IP law through a variety of mechanisms. This year’s conference featured a keynote speech by Quentin Palfrey ’02, former senior adviser at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, and an opportunity for attendees to examine current IP issues through participation in two case-study groups.

In welcoming remarks preceding the judges panel, HLS Dean Martha Minow cited the importance of innovation to the U.S. economy.

“(N)o economy will survive in the future unless it creates the climate of intellectual-property rules and dispute-resolution techniques that support and sustain innovation while at the same time protecting the investments that people have made,” she said. “This is perhaps the most interesting and challenging time for these issues that any civilization has ever encountered; and, frankly, the future of our country turns on whether or not you get it right.”

Read more about the conference on the Harvard Law School website.

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Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk ’02 received the Charles Fried Intellectual Diversity Award from the Harvard Federalist Society in April.

The award is bestowed upon a faculty member who has furthered the cause of intellectual diversity and free and open debate at Harvard Law School, both inside and outside of the classroom, regardless of that professor’s ideological leanings or favored theories of jurisprudence.

The award was given for the first time in 2005 to Beneficial Professor of Law Charles Fried, for whom it was subsequently named. The Charles Fried Intellectual Diversity Award has been awarded every year since, except for in 2007, in which the Federalist Society conferred a different award to Judge Laurence Silberman.

A specialist in criminal law and family law, Suk is the author of “At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution is Transforming Privacy” (Yale, 2009), which received the Herbert Jacob Prize by the Law and Society Association. She also researches and teaches in the areas of art and entertainment law, and explores legal issues pertaining to the performing arts.

Read more about the award on the Harvard Law School website.

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Harvard Law School has announced the appointment of Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, as a professor of practice.

The professorships of practice at Harvard Law School are given to outstanding individuals whose teaching is informed by extensive expertise from the worlds of law practice, the judiciary, policy and governance.

Gasser’s scholarship and teaching focus on information law and policy, society issues, and the interplay between law and innovation. His projects explore such topics as policy and educational challenges for young Internet users, the regulation of digital technology (currently with focus on cloud computing), ICT interoperability, information quality, the law’s impact on innovation and risk in the ICT space, cybersecurity, and alternative governance systems.

Said HLS Dean Martha Minow: “Urs Gasser is an international leader in information law, internet use and governance, youth media, and the relationship between law and innovation. His work exploring how the Internet is promoting significant shifts in the information ecosystem has been pivotal, most recently in helping to launch the global Network of Internet & Society Centers, a collaborative initiative among academic institutions to advance new cross-national, cross-disciplinary research, teaching and engagement on the most pressing policy questions surrounding new technologies and social change. I could not be more delighted that he will take up this appointment as a professor of practice.”

Read more on the Harvard Law School website.

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Environmental lawlessness was the topic of discussion on April 10, as Richard Lazarus ’79, one of the nation’s foremost experts on environmental law, gave a lecture marking his appointment to the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professorship of Law.

Speaking before a crowd of family, students, colleagues, and friends—including Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts—Lazarus described how environmental law has fallen “in arrears.” After a period of legal and policy innovation that resulted in landmark statutes like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, Congress has not passed a major new environmental statute or amendment since 1990, he said. The result of this stagnation is a growing mismatch between contemporary technology and environmental issues and outdated, inflexible statutes.

“Forty years after modern environmental law’s remarkable emergence here in the United States, there is a whole lot of environmental law, but, our nation’s environmental statutes nonetheless frequently fail to  address, in any systematic way, many of the most pressing environmental problems we face. The law and our governmental institutions are again increasingly in arrears. The legal landscape is simultaneously full and empty, dominated by gaps,” said Lazarus.

Read more and watch a video of the discussion on the Harvard Law School website.

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The Nieman Foundation for Journalism has selected 24 journalists as members of the 76th class of Nieman Fellows at Harvard University. The group includes reporters, editors, columnists, digital media leaders and producers in print, broadcast and online who work around the globe and across media platforms.

Announcing the class, Nieman Curator Ann Marie Lipinski said, “They are extraordinary journalists who have much to offer each other and the broader Harvard community interested in the future of journalism. As Nieman celebrates its 75th year, it is exciting to witness the ways in which these fellows are working to uphold journalism’s highest standards while focused on innovations for radically shifting audiences, technologies, and business models.”

During their time on campus, Nieman Fellows study with some of Harvard’s most distinguished scholars, participate in Nieman seminars, master classes and workshops and work on collaborative projects with other fellows, Harvard faculty and leading thinkers in the Cambridge area.

Those who helped select the new class included Lipinski, a Nieman Fellow in 1990; Amanda Bennett, executive editor of the Projects and Investigations Unit, Bloomberg News; David Joyner, vice president for content, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. in Birmingham, Ala., and a 2012 Nieman Fellow; Nicco Mele, lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School; the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s managing director Colin Maclay, research director Robert Faris and manager of community programs Rebecca Tabasky; Nieman deputy curator James Geary, a 2012 Nieman Fellow, and Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab a Nieman Fellow in 2008.

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Ninety-three students spent April 26-28, 2013 learning how to rapidly respond to a refugee crisis while being faced with a host of stressful distractions from confrontational childsoldiers to rogue journalists. It was all part of the annual disaster simulation organized by The Lavine Family Humanitarian Studies Initiative, the flagship training and professional development program of the Humanitarian Academy at Harvard. The group included graduate students from Harvard School of Public Health, MIT, and Tufts University, and humanitarian professionals who attended as part of the academy’s two-week Humanitarian Response Intensive Course.

For the weekend, Harold Parker State Forest in North Andover, Mass., was transformed into a Sub-Saharan border region beset by extreme weather, food shortages, and militia violence. Students were assigned to teams representing nongovernmental organization such as CARE and Save the Children, and worked to develop a plan to provide services for the region’s refugees. The goal of the simulation exercise is to prepare students to work in crisis situations such as the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

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Researchers from several Harvard Schools and initiatives were instrumental in developing the city of Boston’s first Cyclist Safety Report released on May 15, 2013 by Mayor Tom Menino. The report examined four years of bicycle crash incident data supplied by Boston Police and Boston EMS that will now inform city officials in their continued efforts to make Boston’s roadways safer for vulnerable users.

Dahianna Lopez, a Ph.D. student in health policy at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, conducted the bicycled and pedestrian injury research as part of her dissertation. Lopez received funding from the Boston Area Research Initiative (sponsored in part by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study) and was advised David Hemenway, professor of healthy policy and director of the Harvard Injury Control Center at the Harvard School of Public Health. Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science also provided an in-kind computer scientist to assist with data manipulation.

Key findings showed injured cyclists are less likely to be wearing a helmet than the average cyclists, a majority of incidents that resulted in injury involved motor vehicles, pedestrians comprised only 2-3% of incidents and injuries in all cyclist incidents, and key behavioral factors associated with accidents included cyclists not stopping at red lights or stop signs, cyclists riding into oncoming traffic, drivers not seeing cyclists and drivers/passengers opening doors

The city used the report to develop a series of recommendations to improve safety including helmet use, targeted safety and education campaigns, and a focus on specialized enforcement in “hot-spots.”

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Harvard University Gazette May 24, 2012

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